The Incredible Market So Many DMOs Overlook

People were amazed when it first became apparent in the late 1990s, that Durham, North Carolina drew a higher percentage of visitors through the jointly owned Raleigh-Durham International Airport than any other city in its vast service area.

Studies a few years earlier had also confirmed that the vast majority of these visitors as well as overall visitation to Durham were point-to-point, meaning that the “Bull City” was their ultimate destination and they were not just passing through nor only tacking it on as a stopover.

Many DMOs and even more state and local officials obsess with airports as gateways, but on average, nationwide, including places such as Durham, more than 85% of domestic person-trips taken, including the overwhelming majority of those taken for business including conferences, are done as road trips.

Fully half are instate.

This isn’t counting visitors from within a 50 miles radius, although studies show that Southerners are inclined to travel as far as 244 miles round trip for a day trip, or up to 122 miles each way.

This is the sweet spot that many Destination marketers miss, especially small, emerging destinations where it should be the strategic focus.

It is useful to focus on Gen X and Baby Boomers because more than half of Millennials feel they don’t have the time for even a day trip, and even then it is primilary a foodie trip (35%.)

So studies of road-trippers focus on people who are 45+ years old where the incidence for leisure road trips is between 85% and 89% although it is people in their 60s who are the most active road-trippers.

Only a third of road-trippers fully plan their trips in advance and only half try new new destinations.  But while for men driving it is the destination that matters, women are more given to relaxation and rejuvenation.

An exception may be road-trippers who use vacation rentals, where half of women drivers put the “pedal to the metal” while 29% of male drivers are open to the “long and leisurely” route.

Outside of trips for year-end holidays, road trips potential overall is evenly spread from May through October. 

Making road-trippers unlikely to being “intercepted” enroute is that 72% stick only to the main roads - while 5% take scenic routes and 23% take a combination.

Billboards are especially useless for this purpose because 73% of road-trippers now use GPS including 43% who have in-dash systems.  Google is the other preferred app for pit stops along the way.

It is more likely that a destination can appeal to the 30% of road-trippers who look beyond the ultimate destination by reaching them online as they search popular end-desintations, more so on the outbound leg than the return.

Cities or towns town are the most popular destinations, followed by a friend or family members home.  Cities in the South are twice as popular as beaches and seven times more popular as mountains.

Only 2% take cross country road trips such as you have read about on this blog and only 1% starts off with no particular destination in mind.

For those who are open to stop-overs, a destination might appeal to 29% for a park or beach for a little over three hours.  The same percentage is open to stopping in a city or town along the way for up to 4 hours.

Local culture falls next in popularity with museums appealing to 15%, winery tours (8%), concerts/theater (5%) and sporting events (3%.)

But remember, even in these instances, any stops in route are more likely outbound than on the return and 4-in-10 make absolutely no stops enroute.

For nearly three-quarters, road trips are their favorite way to travel and 87% make them three times a year. 

DMOs for unfamiliar destinations are best advised to focus on nearby cities for demand and then for day trips and short weekends until that demand can justify additional capacity.

Any advertising done by a DMO trying to encourage stops enroute or in an an attempt to draw day trips or short weekend road trips from residents of nearby cities needs to be online, not on billboards, with a focus on search results.

Remember 3-in-4 use GPS and more and more move that direction each year.  They are more and more likely to be annoyed by roadside blight.

So a priority must be ensuring the regular submission of indepth GPS data for streets and highways as well as continually prodding and assisting all tourism related businesses, organizations and events to secure and “own” their online/GPS “real estate.”

Many states, including North Carolina, still seem to perpetuate the illusion that road trips are serial in nature and/or that visitors to a destination can be lured into driving to other communities for things easily found where they are visiting.

In part, this is why so many communities still engage in predatory marketing.

But that model hasn’t been aligned with consumer behavior for 50-70 years, if ever.  Travelers via all modes very rarely venture more than seven miles even within their primary destination.

DMO marketing doesn’t have to be “rocket science” but hubris, including that among local officials as well as misinformation from other DMOs, can make it a lot more difficult.

Focusing on instate road-trippers may lack sex appeal but it is a very lucrative strategy for destinations of any size.

The New Community Marketing Model

I promised during the last post entitled, “Community Marketing Malpractice” to touch in this sequel on the “new model” that has replaced the marketing paradigms that were found so broken ten years ago.

For many marketers, not just community marketers, nothing has really changed. It is tragic that their marketing practices remain frozen in time even though they began to lose steam thirty to fifty years ago.

Oh, they may have added some new jargon and layered on a new tactic or two such as digital but at the core, their approach really hasn’t changed from what was done more than two generations ago.

To be fair, many community marketers who want to change remain captive to stakeholders and officials who are trapped in the past.

Overall, though, at the root of this inertia is a multi-billion dollar “industrial complex” that in the words of Seth Godin is trapped because “no one owns the problem,” so “no one is working very hard to fix it.”

When no one appears to be taking accountability, a friend of mine calls that, “No one owning the file.”

Casualties are not only malpractice and negligence in marketing but a failure at its own hand of a model that has until now underwritten information and entertainment in our culture.

Those marketers, though, who are blazing a new model have one thing in common.  They never saw marketing as static, not because they have “schpilkas,” a yiddish term used to mean “ants-in-the-pants.”

They understand that the underlying purpose of marketing is differentiation and that includes differentiation of how one conducts marketing.

These pioneers are also fortunate to have stakeholders who give them that latitude.

So what is the new marketing model?  For one, it is truly data-driven which means that advertising is dead and that doesn’t just mean traditional advertising.

The essence of new paradigms is almost always found evident in the ones that are replaced.

Marketers have long distinguished earned media from paid media, although both cost money.  The latter is an attempt to buy consumer attention while the former involves working hard to earn it.

In the old days, it meant generating interest through publicity including news coverage (earned) vs. trying to buy that attention (advertising,) which has always been much more cost-effective.

But today it involves a wide range of ways to engage customers including “search, social and content marketing.”  It is why analysts predict that by next year marketing will involve greater technology budgets than organizations typically devote to IT overall.

Another equally important element of this new marketing model is the importance of content design.

Others helping to shape this new model distinguish earned, owned and paid media with things such as a web and/or mobile site, blogs and social media channels falling under “owned” media and search engine optimization overlapping with “earned” media.

They still use paid media but only where its turn-on ratio far exceeds any turn-off such as where the medium reinforces owned and earned media, e.g. an official visitors guide to a community or state or local, state or regional lifestyle magazines and websites.

One of the key metrics is Word of Mouth (WOM) impact on business.  Studies show that two-thirds will be offline and one-third will be via social sites, blogs, reader boards and photo and video sharing tracking positive, neutral and negative.

Recent studies show that two-thirds of the impact of word of mouth is direct and one-third is as an amplifier of paid media.  The impact is also more immediate compared to traditional media.

Up to 80% of offline WOM occurs in the first two weeks as well as up to 95% of online WOM, compared to between 30 and 60% for television.  WOM drives 5 times more sales than paid advertising impressions.

It happens that in Durham, North Carolina where I live, the DMO is one of the first in North America to use an approach to measuring WOM called The Net Promoter Score.

Building on its pioneering public opinion research, the Durham DMO uses the method to not only measure promoters, passives and detractors among both internal and external audiences but the net strength of those sentiments.

It measures how likely people are to recommend visiting Durham.  More on the latest results in a few weeks but based on studies of the sources consumers find most trustworthy, it is one of the most crucial marketing metrics.

Analysts have also found that earned and owned media has 10 to 100 times the value of a paid advertisement.

Nielsen, which is in the business of quantifying traditional paid advertising, has found that “on average, expert content lifted familiarity of a brand 88% more than branded content and 50% more than user reviews.”

They also found that expert content far outperforms paid content for lifting purchase consideration.  Other Nielsen studies have found that organic search wins out over paid search results on Google and Bing, for instance, 94% of the time.

The new paradigms for marketing are more staff intensive and require a lot harder work as well as a pioneering and innovative organizational culture.

They also require new levels of sincerity and authenticity as consumers grow ever more vigilant about content and media in general.

It will be both/and for a while longer as all such shifts are but the fulcrum has shifted quickly and dramatically in favor of earned and owned content compared to paid content.

Community Marketing Malpractice

My degrees were in history and political science.  I also studied law.  But my career was in marketing; or more specifically, the marketing of communities.

Fortunately, my collegiate exposure to marketing was a theoretical survey course using the provocative teachings of Harvard’s Dr. Theodore Levitt.

So I always had a much different, and many would say provocative approach to community destination marketing than my DMO peers, who over-relied on the components of traditional sales and advertising.

Results would suggest far more successful too, than those who over-relied on the components of traditional sales and advertising.

Far too many still do today, which is puzzling.  This post may help young community marketers avoid what had been termed “marketing malpractice” by the time I retired nearly six years ago.

A lot about marketing has changed during that span.  Maybe it intrigues me as to why many DMO execs aren’t keeping up because my intellectual curiosity hasn’t yet retired.

Marketing includes the elements of sales and advertising but it fundamentally differs in its overall purpose.

Myopically, to use one of Dr. Levitt favorite words, “selling” customarily has focused on the needs of the seller.

Many use the term relational “selling” today but then still pretty much focus on what “they” have to sell rather than what the customer needs.

Advertising is and has always been focused on “getting” attention.  Trying to “demand” attention is far more like it, which is why so many marketers call it a form of “yelling.”

This is confirmed in this age of waning attention spans when so many lazy practitioners desperately seem to only know how to “yell” louder and louder.

Marketing weaves these and five or so other components into a blend designed instead on creating and satisfying customers, according to Levitt, which means “un-creating” customers for your community if that means directing their attention to destinations more suited.

A longitudinal study at USC determined in 2010 that traditional advertising now has an overall negative return of investment but that its decline began three decades ago, a decade before the Internet was made available for public use.

Still, many of those who bothered to read the study theorized that the demise of advertising was due to the Internet or the fragmentation of media or even clutter, meaning a proliferation of too many ads.

But marketing historians were aware that complaints about ad “cutter” date, at least, to January 20, 1759 when a copywriter and essayist noted, “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused.”

Dr. Thales Teixeira (Tech-Sarah,) a contemporary Harvard marketing researcher, is an expert in what he calls the “economics of attention.” 

From various studies he has graphed that attention to even  television ads had plummeted from 97% of viewers in 1990 to fewer than 2 in 10 today, even though ads are more than 75% shorter in length.

Attention to ads was plummeting long before the Internet was an alternative and had fallen by nearly half when TiVo, the first DVR device that enabled ad-skipping was introduced in 1999.

This was also long before mobile devices divided the attention of the 44% of viewers who multitask into even thinner slices.

Illustrating the desperation of advertisers, including most that are oblivious to the drop in attentiveness, is that during that span the cost per 1,000 primetime viewers has skyrocketed from $18 to nearly $200 per view, while the quality of attention has severely degraded.

Dr. Teixeira calculates that “Attention is one of our three most valuable, scarce and fungible resources.”

Now even Levitt recognized in his 1993 treatise entitled Advertising: “The Poetry of Becoming,” that ads at the very least provides “variety and changes the pace.”

It’s not unlike the rationale one my friends argues on behalf of billboards, a long-obsolete medium.  But this calculus fails to take into account the turn-of to turn-on ratio of ads.

Yup, and a few people only buy print magazines that are purposely laden with ads.  But attention today, and for several decades now, is something you earn rather than demand.

It is about “them,” not “you” and “yelling” about your product, your community, your brand is a turn-off even when you try to be cute and entertaining.

In the words of Seth Godin, “the goal of marketing interaction isn’t to close the sales, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married.  No, the opportunity is to move foreword, earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.”

Trust is the key to earning attention and “you must build trust before you need it,” or want it.

Godin also explains why advertisers seem clueless and only respond by increasing clutter.  “And as with pollution, because no one owns the problem, no one is working very hard to solve it.”

“Advertising” he argues, while explaining why consumers are now “using a sledgehammer to block them all” is in “a relentless race to the bottom.”

A former classmate of mine at BYU who is now renowned Harvard business professor by the name of Dr. Clay Christensen, argued several years before I retired that the paradigms of marketing itself are broken and must be reconfigured beginning with the way we segment customer prospects.

He shows how any communication under the umbrella of marketing, including advertising, must, in the end, show consumers what “job” they need to hire your product or community to do, exposing the flaw in communities that try to be appealing at everything, only to find they have sold their soul.

Christensen, who is famous for coining the concept of disruptive innovation, would not only agree with me that many of my peers, though much younger are marketing dinosaurs but that they are committing “Marketing Malpractice.”

I will continue this primer in the next post by reviewing why techniques such as advertising, not just roadside billboards, are now so obsolete.

Unfortunately, most marketing dinosaurs probably didn’t get this far (sigh.)

“Foresensing”–The Key to Evergreen

In the days before texting I had friends, who even after email had become common via mobile devices, would always call or leave a voice mail message when they needed something or had a question.

It typically involved a document or some research finding.  So I would fulfill the requests quickly via email to leave a paper trail, but these individuals would invariably call again for clarification.

That is unless they disagreed with the information I had sent or something our organization was doing predicated on the findings, in which case they would write a lengthy email neglecting to include the background and copy a trillion other people, now understood as a cardinal sin.

Boy, I sure miss that drama.  But don’t jump to the conclusion that they had a learning or reading disability.

People who did that may have been much more strategic and savvy than it seems.  They probably accepted something I, too, understood at the time but chose not to further enable:

1. Many people no longer read;  2. Even more prefer to shape decisions and opinions on anecdotes and personalities rather than data and information; and 3. Very few are paying attention to the future or evolving.

In community work, like business and government, the world is awash with dead or dying organizational models which are kept on life support by people either addicted to those behaviors or overly conscious of those still all-too-prevalent conditions.

This is why “best practices” are so easy to spot, not merely for purposes of copying, but because the organizations that exhibit them are purposely wired for what entrepreneurial researcher Dr. Joseph Pistrui calls “nextsensing.”

During my now-concluded career in community destination marketing to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development in four different parts of the country, I was what some would now characterize as an “evergreen entrepreneur.”

Only, I was on the quasi-public-private side of things. Still, according to some, I exhibited all 7 characteristics of evergreen entrepreneurs to some extent in the five different startups with which I was involved and/or led.

I enjoyed startups because you not only get to build an organization from scratch but you get to evolve each one by quantum leaps each time.  During the last half of my career, I learned to do this every few months with the same organization.

Nextsensing doesn’t come from “group-think” exercises such as brainstorming which, as studies have shown, is a pure waste of time unless accompanied with a very healthy dose of critical thinking.

Unfortunately, most people who facilitate or are drawn to the “kumbaya” school of brainstorming seem averse to thinking at all, let alone critically, because to them, asking questions is criticism.

But this is only one of the reasons that the traditional approach to making strategic plans is often futile, or when successful, are destined to be quickly relegated to a dusty shelf (buried on a rarely seen portion of a computer drive.)

An even more compelling reason these plans are now ineffective is that true strategic insight, strategic foresight or “nextsensing,” must be woven into the DNA of an organization in such a way that it occurs organically in real time.

Writing about this aspect in a classic book entitled, The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business, author and researcher Arie de Geus famously wrote “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be your only sustainable advantage.”

Earlier, in 1988, de Geus termed this as “institutional learning” in an article in Harvard Business Review.  He explained that this type of learning is much more difficult than individual learning.

Organizations that are “evergreen” outperform those that are focused only on near-term returns.  According to studies, de Geus explains that they “institutionalize change” rather than reacting to crisis.

In the past, even evolving organizations could afford to gestate learning anywhere from 12 to 18 months before acting on it.

Today, that evolution must be in real time.

Researchers involved with the Nextsensing Project have identified four skills needed to see the future in real time:

1. Stretch Sensibilities – A mindset and commitment to exploration.
2. Stand for Change – Set new directions and adjust priorities.
3. Create a new Order – Retool the enterprise to set new goals and trigger actions no one else has set or achieved.
4. Lead with “Foresense” – Transform hunch to vision and new skills.

In late 1970s, Bert Lance, a banker and native-Georgian who headed the Office of Budget and Management for then President Jimmy Carter popularized the expression, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” an old Swedish proverb.

No even remotely sustainable organization has that luxury today.

A Feeding Frenzy Lesson for Community Image

Some of my former peers in visitor-centric economic and cultural development seemed relieved to learn something that became clear to me nearly a decade ago.

Less than four years before I retired after nearly four decades in that profession, a year-long firestorm of negative news coverage erupted.

Fortunately, the community marketing organization (DMO) I led at the time was already far more savvy than most about reputation management.

More on that lesson learned later but some of my colleagues seem to be drawing a mistaken conclusion from visitor surveys that negative news obsessions - even when local - are harmless to a community’s potential to draw visitors.

A few clarifications are in order:

• There is no such thing as local news.  News outlets measure audience by huge swaths of counties including dozens and dozens of cities and towns, based on where they hope to have influence.

Durham, North Carolina, where I live is part of a so-called media market that stretches over 22 counties and parts of two states.

It is an archaic, obsolete model in a digital world where businesses and consumers now have truly hyper local alternatives.

• Even when periodic resident surveys show a community’s self-image is high and relatively immune from negative “local” news, there is another consideration.

It can still contaminate the views of not only potential daytrip visitors from surrounding communities but if, like Durham, a community generates so many jobs that 2 in 3 are held by commuting non-residents it results in the perpetuation of negative water-cooler myths.

When these non-residents hold hospitality-related jobs and interface with visitors at airports and in hotels, restaurants, stores and features, the impact can be hugely negative.

So management of a community’s reputation and defense of its brand or personality is broader than just what populations of potential visitors think or how immune they may be to negative “local” news.

Of course, all of this requires a DMO to continually monitor the opinions of residents, commuters and nearby, statewide, regional and national populations.

There are other uses of this information.  Local stakeholders, including businesses owned or operated by non-residents and especially elected officials and local governments, often fall under the misconception that a community can build its way to prominence.

There are a lot of good reasons for a community to continually augment its visitor-related product, especially if it freshens place-based assets that truly differentiate a community without selling its soul to generica.

Regular opinion surveys such as those I mention above will not show any linkage of opinion to new developments.

I say “any” because after studying scores of these, there is little or no linkage to perception.  Buzz created around new developments, even when and if sustained, just can’t reach enough people to dent misimpression, which are fueled by much more pervasive influences.

The DMOs I led used image surveys dating back to the very early 1980s so I’m not basing these observations on just one community or a particular building splurge or series of developments over time.

I was always intrigued that new development had little or no impact on perceptions but, as I promised, I will delve into what we learned from that year-long news frenzy from March 2006 until April 2007.

Because it a DMOs role to deal with news coverage, promoting and facilitating stories and making clarifications as well as serving the needs of journalists and editors whether they be “local,” state, regional, national or global, a byproduct of this event is that a lot of local stakeholders became more cognizant and appreciative of our role.

The coverage was regarding allegations of rape by some lacrosse team members at Duke.

Both the Durham Police and truly local news media were confident the allegations, while troubling, were without merit.

But then the newspaper in nearby Raleigh began to fan the flames which in turn reignited listserv chatter, especially among well-meaning social justice activists.

I happened to be on one such listserv during that re-ignition.

Thanks to amplification by the state AP office based in Raleigh, we were soon besieged by news trucks and a feeding frenzy of inaccurate information, innuendo, pejorative and speculation.

The Durham Police were forced to reopen the investigation and a lot of individual reputations and careers were ultimately destroyed by the time the Attorney General’s office came to the same conclusion made initially by investigators.

The experience has forever made me skeptical that during news frenzies we are really getting full and balanced information.

Well-meaning chamber types here, failing to understand or respect roles and always eager for a parade to lead, called meetings and began to reinvent the wheel about Durham’s image.

This gave us the opportunity to explain what was being done by the Durham DMO and an innovative coalition it created and facilitates called the Durham Public Information & Communications Council.

Made by those unaware that advertising has long been proven ineffective when it comes to reputation management, the suggestion was made to place full-page ads in national newspapers to set the record straight.

The Durham DMO responded that first we should probably see if perceptions had changed due to the intense and frenzied coverage and ran one of its periodic surveys.

We learned that nationwide, Durham’s positive rating was up and its negative rating down but that some people who didn’t know before had moved to neutral.

By the year after the frenzy, Durham’s image was higher than ever and its negative rating at an all-time low.  Awareness was at an all time high.

The community’s image as a place to visit reached an all-time high with a 16-to-1 positive to negative ratio.  Its image as a place for new business and growth potential was also higher than ever.

Many credited the opportunity Durham’s DMO took during the crisis to better familiarize reporters and editors and lay the seeds for future stories still being reaped today.

The lesson, of course, is not to go out and manufacture negative news frenzies as a means to boost awareness. 

The take-away is that reputation is the product of a lot of very subtle but manageable influences, not just the news.  Covering news is a very difficult profession but at its best a blunt instrument when it comes to getting the “full story” about something.

This is especially true, now that so many national news outlets, rather than take time to investigate, often just quote other news including reporters and editors.

It has been made even more difficult by the fact that as a nation we seem to expect every issue to be viewed as scripted, reality television, even, it appears, our elections for higher office.

I still shake my head at how many communities when faced by a similar frenzy, push their DMOs into wasting millions in advertising not just because ads have long been shown ineffective but because they haven’t even benchmarked perceptions through scientific polling.

Ads, by the way, are scientifically proven to be ineffective because they far too blunt a marketing tactic.  Studies show that they merely harden existing perceptions both negative and positive.

Yelling about yourself as a community, which is what ads are, is not the way to build credibility with external audiences although they may give boosters and officials a false but expensive sense of solace.

Being authentic, honest and persistently earning the respect of national news channels over time is far more effective.  Standing up to inaccuracies and injustice is better done one on one and by equipping grass-roots movements to intervene.

This isn’t to take news media off the hook.  Time has proven the validity of Dr. Barry Glassner’s research in his excellent book entitled, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, something lost on a business journal tactic of stirring up what we should fear from restaurants with an A health rating.

As traditional media collapses, except for those with steadied and principled news management, we will see more and more news outlets manufacturing fear and ruining reputations, if not to stir up ratings, then to blackmail reluctant advertisers.

How a Startup DMO Reached the Pinnacle of Advertising

No one involved ever expected it to endure - let alone be acclaimed -but as it occurred this month, I still get a call about it every year or so over the more than three decades since our little campaign launched.

When concepted in 1980 and launched in 1981, the campaign was intended to last only a few years at best.  Those were the days before testing was feasible and we were just glad it worked.

It remains the only campaign by a community destination marketing organization (DMO) to win a full-blown CLIO award in the overall travel category.

Clio is the preeminent international award competition for the creative business.

The campaign, originally designed to run only as a public service announcement when there were only three TV stations was also recognized as one of the hundred best TV commercial that year.

Advertising Age, a magazine for marketing and media cited it as “A Significant Milestone in the use of Television Technics for Marketing Success.

More than half a lifetime ago, I was only 32 years old at the time and in the first decade of what would be a four-decade career as a DMO exec.  It didn’t sink in until years later how rare what we had achieved actually was.

Friends at Seattle-based Alaska Airlines had won a CLIO award a year earlier and seeing our little campaign’s potential encouraged its submission.

Of course, “I Love New York” as a state tourism campaign had won a CLIO three or four years earlier as did Michigan tourism a few years later.

Two other community DMOs have reached the short list or received bronze or silver recognition in the years since.

DMOs are nonprofit organizations with the in-house skillsets of commercial advertising, marketing and public relations agencies.

But instead of being generalists about a lot of different products and services, DMOs are established to specialize, day in and day out, in the safeguarding and leveraging of the brand of a particular location.

They are a means to draw and optimize visitor centric economic and cultural development for the communities they serve.

Think of DMOs as an inch wide and a mile deep compared to agencies-for-hire which, by nature, must be a mile wide and an inch deep in order to be relevant to many different types of businesses.

Another DMO I subsequently led before retiring went on to garner more than 100 other awards for marketing and best practices.  Still, none quite reached the acclaim achieved by that little spot we produced for Anchorage, Alaska in 1981.

Here is the story of how Wild About Anchorage came to be,  To my wonder, it still resonates there more than three decades later based on online comments.

When I arrived in mid-1978 to complete a three-year-old DMO start up for Anchorage, two of the major obstacles we faced were internal.

Statewide Alaskans backhanded Anchorage with the compliment that that “the best thing about Anchorage was that it was 15 minutes from Alaska.”

Yet research was showing that the amenities offered by Anchorage were important to potential visitors.

At the same time, Anchorage residents were skeptical toward tourism because having divided the state into stereotypes traditional long-haul tourism interests had pegged Anchorage as the overnight between Mt. McKinley and Prince William Sound.

Yet surveys and inventories had shown that Anchorage offered virtually every Alaskan experience in a shorter, less logistical and expensive trip without diverting travelers interested in some of those traditional itineraries.

We needed a communications vehicle that would illuminate Anchorage’s personality and serve to give voice to community pride, while establishing a platform from which we could build awareness of the community’s role in tourism.

During 1979, we tinkered with some print tourism ads headlined Anchorage & Anchorage juxtapositioning two side by side images, one featuring something iconic about Alaska such as wildlife and the other featuring an Anchorage amenity such as great dining.

While we knew it was too “straight up” or serious for the PSAs we wanted to run locally which would also reach the majority of Alaskans, we felt we could build on that positioning.

We were working with a small boutique agency at the time in Seattle which until we could develop organizational capacity was the only entity willing to produce our annual visitors guide including selling the advertising.

One day while discussing the campaign we wanted to create, I mentioned a Chevron commercial that had been created by Kurtz And Friends as an example that might work.

We knew straight up imagery wouldn't be as effective because Alaskans were over exposed to incredible photography.  We also needed something that wouldn’t take the community too seriously.

Tom Bardeen, one of the principles in the boutique, was familiar with Bob Kurtz, who had earned fame doing the titles for The Pink Panther and offered to see if he was interested in producing an animated spot for us on behalf Anchorage.

He was, and either Tom or Bob or maybe both fell on the idea of a chorus line of animals to convey the message that Anchorage & Anchorage had only in an animation format.

The spot took off instantly with not only Anchorage residents but Alaskans as a whole.  Still a decade before the worldwide web would be viable, I guess you could say it went viral.

Within weeks we knew the moose in the center of the chorus line would work as the graphic symbol in our branding of Anchorage for external audiences as would the tagline Wild About Anchorage.

Linda Chase, an event organizer, agreed to do costumes for an actual chorus line we could take on the road at promotions as well as use at local events and during welcome ceremonies for conventions.

A contest in schools gave the moose a name – Seymour of Anchorage – get it?

Tennys Owens, a local art gallery owner, arranged for sales of the original celluloids and residents lined up around the block to buy and frame them. I still have one the board gave me when I moved on.

A statuette of Seymour was created to give to awardees at award dinners.

I left Alaska in late 1987, but Wild About Anchorage remained in use for another 20 years.  In 2007 the Anchorage DMO successfully launched a new brand signature and the tagline “Big Wild Life.”

In 2011, after the Anchorage Daily News pined for Wild About Anchorage in a column, Seymour the Moose, himself, penned an open letter assuring readers that he was still working as a mascot of sorts for the new slogan (smile.)

Coming up with a magical campaign such as this is always a bit serendipitous by nature.

Testing can measure a lot of things including potential popularity, but usually not deep and enduring engagement over more than three decades.

Nor do DMO marketers or should I say DMO governing boards have the patience to let a campaign play out like Anchorage obviously did.  About the time it seems everyone on the planet must be heard of it is when a campaign is just starting to penetrate.

Little did we know then that by the end of that decade traditional advertising overall would begin a three decade decline in effectiveness.

In today’s marketing environment where ads now have a negative return on investment and channel fragmentation makes a PSA campaign impractical, it wouldn’t be possible to do what we achieved in 1981.

I am humbled that people still embrace Wild About Anchorage as a legacy campaign.  We were very lucky and I was blessed to play a part as the producer.

Hats off to Tom Bardeen who wrote the lyrics and Dale Case (101 Dalmatians and Fatherhood) and Pam Cooke (Family Guy and Simpsons) who did the animation and especially Bob Kurtz who designed and directed Wild About Anchorage.

How a Startup DMO Reached the Pinnacle of Advertising

No one involved ever expected it to endure - let alone be acclaimed -but as it occurred this month, I still get a call about it every year or so over the more than three decades since our little campaign launched.

When concepted in 1980 and launched in 1981, the campaign was intended to last only a few years at best.  Those were the days before testing was feasible and we were just glad it worked.

It remains the only campaign by a community destination marketing organization (DMO) to win a full-blown CLIO award in the overall travel category.

Clio is the preeminent international award competition for the creative business.

The campaign, originally designed to run only as a public service announcement when there were only three TV stations was also recognized as one of the hundred best TV commercial that year.

Advertising Age, a magazine for marketing and media cited it as “A Significant Milestone in the use of Television Technics for Marketing Success.

More than half a lifetime ago, I was only 32 years old at the time and in the first decade of what would be a four-decade career as a DMO exec.  It didn’t sink in until years later how rare what we had achieved actually was.

Friends at Seattle-based Alaska Airlines had won a CLIO award a year earlier and seeing our little campaign’s potential encouraged its submission.

Of course, “I Love New York” as a state tourism campaign had won a CLIO three or four years earlier as did Michigan tourism a few years later.

Two other community DMOs have reached the short list or received bronze or silver recognition in the years since.

DMOs are nonprofit organizations with the in-house skillsets of commercial advertising, marketing and public relations agencies.

But instead of being generalists about a lot of different products and services, DMOs are established to specialize, day in and day out, in the safeguarding and leveraging of the brand of a particular location.

They are a means to draw and optimize visitor centric economic and cultural development for the communities they serve.

Think of DMOs as an inch wide and a mile deep compared to agencies-for-hire which, by nature, must be a mile wide and an inch deep in order to be relevant to many different types of businesses.

Another DMO I subsequently led before retiring went on to garner more than 100 other awards for marketing and best practices.  Still, none quite reached the acclaim achieved by that little spot we produced for Anchorage, Alaska in 1981.

Here is the story of how Wild About Anchorage came to be,  To my wonder, still resonates there more than three decades later based on online comments.

When I arrived in mid-1978 to complete a three-year-old DMO start up for Anchorage, two of the major obstacles we faced were internal.

Statewide Alaskans backhanded Anchorage with the compliment that that “the best thing about Anchorage was that it was 15 minutes from Alaska.”

Yet research was showing that the amenities offered by Anchorage were important to potential visitors.

At the same time, Anchorage residents were skeptical toward tourism because having divided the state into stereotypes traditional long-haul tourism interests had pegged Anchorage as the overnight between Mt. McKinley and Prince William Sound.

Yet surveys and inventories had shown that Anchorage offered virtually every Alaskan experience in a shorter, less logistical and expensive trip without diverting travelers interested in some of those traditional itineraries.

We needed a communications vehicle that would illuminate Anchorage’s personality and serve to give voice to community pride, while establishing a platform from which we could build awareness of the community’s role in tourism.

During 1979, we tinkered with some print tourism ads headlined Anchorage & Anchorage juxtapositioning two side by side images, one featuring something iconic about Alaska such as wildlife and the other featuring an Anchorage amenity such as great dining.

While we knew it was too “straight up” or serious for the PSAs we wanted to run locally which would also reach the majority of Alaskans, we felt we could build on that positioning.

We were working with a small boutique agency at the time in Seattle which until we could develop organizational capacity was the only entity willing to produce our annual visitors guide including selling the advertising.

One day while discussing the campaign we wanted to create, I mentioned a Chevron commercial that had been created by Kurtz And Friends as an example that might work.

We knew straight up imagery wouldn't be as effective because Alaskans were over exposed to incredible photography.  We also needed something that wouldn’t take the community too seriously.

Tom Bardeen, one of the principles in the boutique, was familiar with Bob Kurtz, who had earned fame doing the titles for The Pink Panther and offered to see if he was interested in producing an animated spot for us on behalf Anchorage.

He was, and either Tom or Bob or maybe both fell on the idea of a chorus line of animals to convey the message that Anchorage & Anchorage had only in an animation format.

The spot took off instantly with not only Anchorage residents but Alaskans as a whole.  Still a decade before the worldwide web would be viable, I guess you could say it went viral.

Within weeks we knew the moose in the center of the chorus line would work as the graphic symbol in our branding of Anchorage for external audiences as would the tagline Wild About Anchorage.

Linda Chase, an event organizer, agreed to do costumes for an actual chorus line we could take on the road at promotions as well as use at local events and during welcome ceremonies for conventions.

A contest in schools gave the moose a name – Seymour of Anchorage – get it?

Tennys Owens, a local art gallery owner, arranged for sales of the original celluloids and residents lined up around the block to buy and frame them. I still have one the board gave me when I moved on.

A statuette of Seymour was created to give to awardees at award dinners.

I left Alaska in late 1987, but Wild About Anchorage remained in use for another 20 years.  In 2007 the Anchorage DMO successfully launched a new brand signature and the tagline “Big Wild Life.”

In 2011, after the Anchorage Daily News pined for Wild About Anchorage in a column, Seymour the Moose, himself, penned an open letter assuring readers that he was still working as a mascot of sorts for the new slogan (smile.)

Coming up with a magical campaign such as this is always a bit serendipitous by nature.

Testing can measure a lot of things including potential popularity, but usually not deep and enduring engagement over more than three decades.

Nor do DMO marketers or should I say DMO governing boards have the patience to let a campaign play out like Anchorage obviously did.  About the time it seems everyone on the planet must be heard of it is when a campaign is just starting to penetrate.

Little did we know then that by the end of that decade traditional advertising overall would begin a three decade decline in effectiveness.

In today’s marketing environment where ads now have a negative return on investment and channel fragmentation makes a PSA campaign impractical, it wouldn’t be possible to do what we achieved in 1981.

I am humbled that people still embrace Wild About Anchorage as a legacy campaign.  We were very lucky and I was blessed to play a part as the producer.

Hats off to Tom Bardeen who wrote the lyrics and Dale Case (101 Dalmatians and Fatherhood) and Pam Cooke (Family Guy and Simpsons) who did the animation and especially Bob Kurtz who designed and directed Wild About Anchorage.

10 Ways Tourism can Earn the Respect it Deserves

At least since at least the 1960s and including my now-concluded four-decade career, many in travel and tourism have repeatedly whined that this sector of the economy doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Some are individual businesses who just want a pat on the back.  Others feel they need special treatment or shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of making places visitor-worthy.

It can be annoying and proposals rarely seem to go much beyond chest thumping.  Later in this essay I’ll take a stab at some more systemic ideas for how the travel and tourism sector could earn more respect.

But primarily, complainants are referring to the fact that most elected officials and administrators don’t grasp that the function of visitor centric economic and cultural development is to drive tax revenue.

Focus in government is typically only about dividing up the pie with the mistaken view that generating it comes only from a political decision to levy taxes.

The validity of the tourism sector’s concern is often visible when elected officials, often pushed by developers and advocates, are all too eager to drain resources shouldered for that purpose away from tourism promotion for their own uses instead.

These folks are better known as TINOs or “tourism in name only” and identifiable by their siren song of “build it and they will come.”

It is true that worldwide the travel and tourism sector now generates nearly 10% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) including 1 in every 11 jobs.  It is projected by economists that this sector alone will generate 3% of the GDP in America this year.

That’s bigger than the automotive sector, to add perspective, or for that matter agriculture, education and mining too.

Even down to the county-level, visitor-centric economic development generates a similar percentage of GDP in places where it is actively promoted, such as Durham, North Carolina where I live.

Instead of incessantly complaining that officials just don’t get it or care, here are 10 simple behaviors professionals in the travel and tourism sector could adopt to earn the respect it deserves:

Deep Six the widespread misuse of the term “industry.”  Tourism has never been an industry.  It is an economic sector composed by as many as seven very different industries that happen to rely in part or in whole on a common consumer, visitors.  Remember: industry is small, sector is many industries together.

Distinguish demand-driven visitor centric economic and cultural development from more traditional forms of supply-based economic development.  Tourism is on the demand side and truly generates value-added to a community.

Adopt an all for one and one for all approach.  Too often tourism tolerates actions and positions that throw one industry under the bus while protecting those that don’t want to pay their fair share.

Grasp that respect isn’t won or demanded, it is earned, not from tooting your own horn or chest thumping but by patiently and continually explaining how the economy and tax generation works and how travel and tourism is a means for community destination and cultural development

Stop killing the things visitors love.  Avoid cookie-cutter architecture that only homogenizes communities and adopt zero tolerance for use of tools such as long-obsolete roadside billboards that create sign blight (aka litter on a stick,) desecrate scenic vistas and mar sense of place.

Embrace design thinking beginning by performing a “Drano” operation on tourism organizations and models that having achieved their purpose have become obsolete given changes in the tourism ecosystem.  These only serve as a drain on resources and engagement.

Respect and encourage preservation of the unique sense of place in each destination beginning with place-based assets, traits and values.  Encourage communities to differentiate rather than become generic.  Protect them from being hollowed out by mainstream events and mega-facilities.

Root out intra-sector hypocrisy.  Remember that the tourism sector flourishes as a public-private sector partnership.  Discourage public subsidies of mega-events and facilities that will not generate a return on investment to the public treasury.  Refrain from win/lose issues such as forcing restriction of local school calendars.

Take a prominent lead in solutions to societal inequities such as business models based on paying less than a livable wage, vestiges of institutional intolerance and bias as well as gentrification that is insensitive or imbalanced.  Earn a reputation for win/win facilitator.

Encourage widespread adoption of best practices.  Demand that destination marketing organizations earn accreditation.  Cross populate best practices across all industries in the sector including special assessments such as Tourism Improvement Districts or prepared food taxes dedicated to self-funding promotion, wayfinding, cultural landscape and destination clean up and beautification.

It is complicated to form one voice over an entire sector of multiple industries but it can be done and one of the first steps should be to develop a reliable metric.

It all begins by acting like a sector not just an industry.  It is possible only when the sector is as concerned with the overall ecosystem (including the pubic sector) as it is with individual bottom lines.

If these 10 areas are not of interest, just stop whining about respect.

7 Truths

A friend of mine’s job is to make sure a mega-bank’s marketing is ethical, especially any advertising about products.

Although probably subject to regulations, it is a voice of conscience that many in my former field of community destination marketing could use when tempted to place ads for no other measurable reason than to make a stakeholder happy.

This sort of ethical compliance might also come in handy whenever a few are tempted to use ad mediums, such as billboards, that desecrate roadsides and degrade the brands and appeal of towns and states, including their own.

The latter would probably even volunteer to be strapped to the bumper as willing hostages for lawmakers trying to push a bill through in North Carolina that would legalize thousands of illegal billboards, permit their conversion to digital even where residents are overwhelmingly opposed, as well as drive up the cost of road construction.

Pushing aside that public opinion polls show North Carolinians are opposed, regardless of party, gender or geography, a sponsor pointed out that billboards “are no different than radio, TV or newspapers.”

Uh, there is at least one crucial difference.  Radio, TV and newspapers produce content in return.  Billboards destroy content when they blight their surroundings and destruct scenic character.

The legislation’s sponsor went on to use tourism as a justification because “its visibility to the traveling public must be preserved and fostered.”

Okay, let’s forget for a moment that for decades in survey after survey, scenic character and climate have been the two overarching draws for tourism here.  Billboards, eh, not so much.

Any tourism concern still using billboards in North Carolina should take heed from marketing guru Seth Godin who wrote that “Marketers need to spend less time making promises and more time keeping them.”

I’ve had some experience here and there marketing tourism including two decades in North Carolina so let’s look at whether billboards are important to tourism:

• It is true that 1-in-10 Americans prefer to see ads on billboards, however, 90% don’t.
• It is true that 3% of small businesses advertise on billboards, 1-in-10 when medium size businesses are included, however, 90% don’t.
• It is true that .2% (two-tenths of one percent) of adults find billboards the most influential ad medium for purchase decisions, however, 99% don’t.
• It is also true that nearly two-thirds of Americans now use smartphones, 67% of which use them for turn by turn navigation while driving, and 75% while traveling.
• It is also true that beyond smartphones, 40% have other portable GPS devices and 17% have it built into their vehicles, and this is ramping up in North America to another 13 million vehicles annually.
• It is also true that on the road, 62% use mobile devices to find restaurants, 46% to find attractions, 42% to book and research accommodations.
• It is also true, according to Michelin, that as a backup the remaining 39% rely on old fashioned maps, guides and Internet print outs to find their way around.  Billboards fall in the 5% who use none of the above or “other.”

You do the math and decide whether it makes sense to surrender North Carolina’s brand to an obsolete advertising technology which represents a tiny number of jobs and almost no tax revenue.

Then, it might be a good idea to let your elected representative know how you feel.

Of course, tourism isn’t the only consideration.

On the other side of the ledger, not only is scenic character the reason visitors including more than 80% of newcomers and relocating visitors find North Carolina appealing but making trees and vegetation a priority yields air and water purification, carbon sequestration and of course, private property values and quality of place.

Of course, billboard companies, nearly all of them headquartered out-of-state, have obviously filled the ears of lawmakers otherwise.  Too bad they aren’t subject to greater ethical compliance regulations, too.

As for my former profession in community destination marketing or visitor-centric economic and cultural development, it is a good sign that 200 have earned accreditation which includes having a code of ethics.

But it reminds me of when employers found it wasn’t enough on applicants to ask if job applicants had a car, so they added a follow-up question, “Does it run?”

Destination Marketing Association International dropped a long standing requirement that members and their staff members sign a code of ethics about a decade ago now because some “good ‘ole boys” couldn’t see how to enforce it, especially when other “good ‘ole boys” were in violation.

Of course, the answer was easy.  Throw the bums out!

Culture, Mindset, Analytics and Nonprofits

A recent article heralded the halo effect of advertising, but the almost impossible task of measuring the effectiveness of traditional advertising means any probable halo effect is more attributable to marketing.

This is because marketing is a blend of various communication activities, only one of which is advertising, and less and less of that is traditional advertising which experts now find has an overall negative return on investment.

It is this blend, when customized to each organization, that creates a synergy transcendent of any of its elements.

Unfortunately, a survey released this month shows that less than a third of marketers (32%) put data and metrics “at the heart of their strategic decision-making.

What is disturbing about that finding is that data-driven marketing is nothing new.  By the early 1980s, it had found its way to the core of a small nonprofit community marketing organization I led.

Granted, I was an “early adopter,” as I still was in 1989 with similar startup with which I was involved.

But seeing how quickly this approach enabled early adopters to leapfrog more established competitors, one would expect it to be more mainstream by now.

Studies pinpoint that the reason so many marketers remain mired so far in the past is because of they lack a strategic mindset even though recruiters for top marketing positions now find that attribute, along with analytic skills, more important for marketing leadership than creativity.

A study conducted in 2012, long after I retired from four decades in the field of community marketing, showed that the nonprofit sector in the U.S. had grown 3.5 times the rate of the for-profit sector.

Fast Company magazine surveyed their ten most innovative companies in not-for-profit recently to ascertain what talents and skills will be in most demand in this sector over the next five years.

Top are data-savvy skills.  Next come design skills.

Those, along with technology were at the core of my last non-profit startup 26 years ago.  I don’t say that to gloat but out of puzzlement. We couldn’t have been three decades ahead.  Really!

If I stumbled into those competitive advantages so long ago, how is it that so many of my former peers across the country apparently still don’t get it or is it?  Or maybe its that their governing boards don’t get it?

Survey results show that 96% of marketers today know that data is important or very important including 9-out-of-10 in senior management but as the authors point out, that is very different than knowing how to collect, manage, analyze and utilize it.

Telling is that fewer than half of marketing organizations give more than half of their own employees access to their data.

This is why so many go to the trouble of contracting analysis to show how effective their marketing strategies are, known as the “turn-on” ratio.

However, they nearly always fail to measure the equally significant “turn-off” ratio such as when their ads are merely a form of yelling or placed in the wrong context such as on billboards where they are associated with desecration.

Even Super Bowl ads have a 5-to-1 turn-off to turn-on ratio, further illustrating that less than a third of marketers have data and analytics at the heart of strategic decisions.

Marketers will be in high demand if they have a strategic mindset, understand analytics and design and recognize that marketing is not only about “turning-on” consumers but minimizing “turn-off.”

The president of the Rockefeller Foundation is quoted as saying that nonprofits in general are projected to continue to hire more talent than the for-profit sector over at least the next five years.

Silverpop, an IBM company, has just published an ebook entitled, The New CMO Guide – A Handbook for Marketing Leaders.  This is also an example of content marketing, a form of advertising that has replaced traditional advertising.

The authors note research showing that 82% of marketers feel unprepared to deal with the data explosion.  In part, this is why the average tenure for chief marketing officers is now only 48 months.

Even more so, this may also explain why, according to Spencer Stuart, this tenure was less than 24 months just a decade ago when the importance of data belatedly began to dawn on marketers.

But especially in the field of community marketing, hiring a chief executive with a strategic mindset who understands analytics isn’t enough.

It is an organization’s culture that makes all the difference and sets the tone for “innovation, growth, market leadership, ethical behavior and customer satisfaction,” according to a new white paper published by Spencer Stuart, also a form of content marketing.

It was management guru Peter Drucker who originally discussed that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” later modified by others as “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

But Drucker wasn’t referring to a document as much as the strategic mindset.

Culture in the organizational sense is what Dr. Kelly Page of NativeHQ refers to as “an iterative process over time that we enact, guided by vision and values forged through conversation and collaboration…our individual and collective voice over time.”

Shawn Parr, head of Bulldog Drummond, encourages us to view an organization’s culture as a “nurturing habitat for success.”

He continues that “Cultural cannot be manufactured;  It has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down.  Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty.

A shared culture creates critical alignment.  And that alignment must also include each and every member of an organization’s governing board.

The Hallmark for Tomorrow's Leaders

Whenever I guest lecture to students in hospitality, many of whom are training to follow my now concluded career path in visitor centric economic and cultural development I jokingly caution them about two things.

But I am not really joking when I tell them that while they will probably graduate from college in the top 1% of knowledge in that field, they will quickly face two challenges.

The odds that their supervisor is engaged and still learning are slim because workplace surveys show that even among managers, only 35% are what experts call “engaged,” while 51% are just putting in time.

An even more worrisome 14% are actively trying to undermine others.

The second challenge they will face is that within a few months the relevance of their knowledge begins to degrade becoming obsolete within the same amount of time it took them to graduate.

Knowledge today is fleeting or “disposable” in the words of leadership researcher and fellow alumnus Liz Wiseman, although 15 years apart in our tenure at BYU.  A key to being workplace engaged is to be a continuous and never-ending learner.

A book Wiseman published six months ago had given me pause of introspection about my career and what people may have seen in me that caused them to put me in the “pilot’s” seat of my first DMO within 36 months of graduating from college.

The book is entitled Rookie Smarts – Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work.

Wiseman doesn’t discount the value of experience but promotes the evidence that “real vibrancy comes from thinking young…with the acuity and agility of a newcomer...” and generating new learning every day.

With experience comes the ability to see patterns and if given the propensity, to think strategically but Wiseman supports the science that one of the key differences “between masters and novices is their strategic horizon.”

The book isn’t written to inspire rookies, though it will, but to inspire veterans to channel their inner rookie smarts.

I came into my first CEO position for a DMO in my mid-20s and about 80 years after the first DMO in the nation was established.  But it was clear to this rookie then that most DMOs had failed to evolve.

The next thirty years were a golden age of community destination marketing for early adopters with advances in research, polling and analytics as well as the rediscovery of the importance of sense of place and placed based assets.

This was the span of time when travel for conventions went into a long, slow decline, now just 10% of travel overall.  It was also when traditional advertising tipped into decline as a marketing tool, sliding to a negative return on investment.

It was a period when federal government innovations such as the Input-Output model for measuring economic impact, GPS, mobile telephony and the Internet were made available for consumer use and coupled with personal computers including Smart Devices to fuel the sharing economy.

Who wouldn’t think like a rookie with changes such as these making so much knowledge disposable?

However, judging by a metric for those willing to undergo third party diagnosis, I fear that 80% of DMO execs may have either retired in place or have been mothballed in place by their governing boards or community leaders.

But even if the reason these DMOs seem decades behind is due to the latter, organizational researchers at Bocconi University and Singapore Management University find that for subordinates, being candid to power holders pays off.

Graduates seeking a career in community destination marketing won’t have to worry about DMOs becoming obsolete as one or two outside consultants always seem to warn although there are plenty of communities on track to become unmarketable.

Places where DMOs will always be relevant regardless of technological changes are those that focus on:

• Telling a community’s story
• Protecting and fostering sense of place and authenticity
• Providing valuable content rather than advertising
• Safeguarding and defending a community’s image and brand

Those roles are at the very core of community destination marketing.  But communities hell-bent on the following will not need a DMO only an ATM because they:

• Subvert sense of place for mainstream facilities
• Subsidize events to locate or relocate there
• Mistake advertising and catchy taglines for branding
• Worship at the altar of “build it and they will come”

In her book, Wiseman uses the terms rookie and veteran for mindsets that “illustrate patterns of behavior.”   DMOs have always functioned in a VACU world, an acronym for and environment of “Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity” and none more so than today.

But those trapped in the strategies I noted above are as Wiseman puts it “on a slippery slope from trophy to atrophy.”

While DMOs will always be in demand wherever sense of place thrives, it is true that many communities are quickly becoming obsolete as destinations.

For any community wishing to change course before it is too late, read the part of the book when Wiseman worked at Oracle and its founder, Larry Ellison suggested she cut her staff by 77% and rebuild.

Communities need DMOs where “professionals…operate less like Caretakers and more like Backpackers, unencumbered by their current reality and able to explore and agilely investigate beyond immediate boundaries.”

Many books on leadership and workplace success should have been a white paper or even a blog post.

Rookie Smarts, however, is jam packed with relevant and useful information on every page and one that I would add to the bookshelf if I were just a rookie starting out after college.

Attributes For Serving On Governing Boards

I became a CEO in my mid-20s, at a very young age, albeit for an organization still in start-up.

Friends have always kidded me that it must have been nice not having a boss for all but a handful of years during my long ago concluded four-decade career.

But I always had bosses.  They were governing boards of rotating directors to whom I was accountable that always included a member or two who didn’t understand or accept that a board only gives direction as a whole, not as individuals.

Even a chair person couldn’t give direction without direction provided by the board as a whole.  Often the most difficult transition for some board members is from the managerial or owner role in their own organizations to one of oversight as part of a group.

Unfortunately, few of us are vetted for even minimal attributes and skills, such as critical and strategic thinking or how to run a meeting before being appointed or elected to governing boards.

An article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review about where boards in general fall short, made me think back to how fortunate I was to have so many great board members given the agendas of some individuals and how and why they were appointed.

Only 16% of the directors surveyed thought the boards they served on understood the dynamics of the industries in which their organizations were involved and only 22% believed their boards knew how their organizations created value.

The community destination marketing organizations (DMOs) that I served were especially complex because they function as intermediaries between external stakeholders and internal stakeholders including a whole sector of different industries.

That a board member comes from one of the front line stakeholder industries is no guarantee they will understand the overall sector, let alone the transcendent purpose of visitor-centric economic and cultural development: to broaden the local tax base while guarding unique sense of place inherent to the communities they serve.

This is why being teachable is an important attribute for potential governing board members.

As the authors note, the two codified core aspects of fiduciary responsibilities of board members include loyalty to the organization, “placing the organization’s interest ahead of one’s own,” which includes outside special interests.

The other is prudence, ensuring that “the proper care, skill and diligence is applied to business decisions.”  The authors note that there is nothing to suggest that the “role of loyal and prudent directors” is to pressure management to maximize” short term interests.

Yet, in my experience, this is what special interests relentlessly seek.   Examples of this in community destination marketing organizations are when elected officials or facility managers try to pressure a DMO to substitute short term objectives such as subsidizing groups to use certain facilities or to fill hotel rooms or and seats near term.

The far more valuable strategic purpose of a DMO is to safeguard a communities indigenous sense of place and to fuel the overall local business climate so as to broaden the tax base.

This generates far greater overall revenues than if used instead to merely close the short term operating deficits of a few public or private facilities.

Organizations with self-appointed boards, unless the nomination process is truly democratic, as in the first two organizations I led, can still be rife with directors there to serve their own interests or those of cronies or cabals.

But publicly appointed boards, such as those I worked under the last half of my career, have their own set of challenges, especially as happened to several of the boards to which I answered, when an elected official or two deliberately pushed the appointment of a board member they hoped would undermine the organization from within.

What would lead a public official to do this?  Avarice.

Unfortunately, very little attention is paid in government to generating revenue, which many officials believe comes only by raising the rate of taxation.  Instead, they spend nearly all of their time focused on spending, or dividing up the pie or even worse shell games.

This is how elected officials or administrators can come to see the short term, such as eliminating the operating deficit on a facility that was always expected to run a deficit as more important than spending that amount on marketing the overall destination which would generate a return of six times that amount.

But short term thinking is not unique to elected governing boards.  It is the same strategic failure that forces many publicly traded companies to sacrifice long term value for short term payouts.

The authors of “Where Boards Fall Short” contend that board members must focus on long term strategy.  They further state that “what matters most is the quality and depth of the strategic conversations that take place.”

Unfortunately, being strategically inclined is rarely, if ever, given consideration when appointing members to governing boards probably because fewer than 14% of Americans are strategically inclined.

The word inclined is used because this is a talent, a propensity, more than a skill, making it difficult to learn or teach.  I suspect, when they are strategically inclined, CEOs spend far more than the 1% to 3% of the time most CEOs do on average with strategy.

Unfortunately, the same is probably true of many governing boards, where members arrive late, leave early and complain about prep time to read materials and reports prior to the meetings, let along delve into strategic conversations.

Appointing or electing governing board members is as great a responsibility as serving on one.  Here are a handful of important attributes to keep in mind:

• 30% of the entire workforce in America is truly engaged.  Half just show up and go through the motions.  Nearly 20% are troublemakers.

Rarely is someone who is disengaged in other areas of their life going to suddenly become engaged as a member of a governing board.  Make being engaged a pre-requisite to appointment.

Beware of organizations who seek benchwarmers.  Appoint board members who are strategically inclined and who will be eager students of the organization’s mission and environment.

• Recalibrate the size of governing boards.  Experts now believe the size of a non-profit board functions best with five members.  Poor governance increases with board size.
• Appoint board members who reflect the values of the organizations.  If that is fund-raising, appoint fund-raisers.  If that is volunteerism, appoint activists.  If that is being information driven, appoint members who understand and appreciate analytics.
• Appoint members who understand and embrace ethics and compliance not people who see ethics only as a boundary to be skirted.  There is a reason compliance is no longer housed in legal departments in corporations.

Most importantly, appoint people to governing boards who are or can be in synch with an organization’s culture, values and mission, who want to move it forward, not pull it back, and who know how to resist special interests including their own individual interests.

The 400% Increase In Workplace Skills

Destination marketing a community is more complicated than marketing a specific business or organization.

Community destination marketing organizations (DMOs) such as those I managed are intermediaries.  They have no control over the communities they market requiring that a lot of time be spent cajoling stakeholder businesses, strategic partners and officials to align.

Few, if any, of these stakeholders have any clue about marketing let alone sense of place, but usually they think they do, making alignment far more complicated than it may sound and a never-ending process.

And you thought herding cats was difficult.

Residents are the ultimate internal stakeholders for a DMO, especially those who are passionate about their community, but if they only knew that the greatest obstacles to marketing a community comes from those they assume would be the first to get on board.

Workplace skills needed for community marketing range far beyond what people think of as marketing including analytics, project management, technology, strategy-making, critical thinking and organizational behavior, to name a handful.

Also required is a working knowledge of areas such as archeology, history, physiography, consumer psychology, geology, financing, culture, ecosystems and authenticity.

Just in the first 18 months after I retired more than five years ago in late 2009, skills needed in the workplace increased more than 400% from 178 to 924.

This is also why experts see the future of higher education including periods of intensive competency-based education and re-education while in the workforce, something my last organization began to provide to staff with an online program in 2005.

Each employee was able to take up to 20 courses annually selecting from over 3,000 titles, each followed by an online test to demonstrate competency.  But supervisors and direct reports selected some courses in support of specific roles that could be taken during the workday.

The inability to adapt to this need for competency-based workplace education is what led disruptive innovation guru Dr. Clayton Christensen a few years ago to predict that within 15 years, half of the universities and colleges in America could be in bankruptcy.

He didn’t mean that the need for traditional higher education will decline but that the way it will be accessed is rapidly shifting in a way that may leave thousands of smaller colleges as well as many state institution behind.

A leader in this movement to competency-based education for students already in the workforce is Westminster College, a few blocks from where my daughter and grandsons live.

Another is Southern New Hampshire University which redesigned its entire business administration program into modules that provide an innovative, competency-based, three year bachelor’s degree  but  this is all a topic for another essay.

A litmus test I often used to quickly detect how much someone really knew about marketing a community is if they still lobbied for mass marketing such as traditional print, radio and television, dating them by at least three decades.

That’s when, as research shows, marketing shifted away from how many eyeballs you reached to reaching the right eyeballs, not by “shouting” to get attention with traditional ads but earning attention through astute “content marketing.”

Long ago, reaching just the right consumers right at the time when they wanted the information through tools such as search engine optimization and Google adwords transcended traditional advertising.

Savvy marketers today understand that 20% of their efforts produce 80% of their results and similarly 20% of their customers or prospects represent 80% of their success.

The fact that I came early to this awareness in my forty year career is due to listening to astute elders in destination marketing who understood how fast things were changing.

The challenge in marketing is to cast more and more narrowly in order to zero in on the most likely and highly engaged prospects - without interrupting them - until they are seeking information to make a decision and it is clear your destination or product is what they want.

Now, according to studies, marketers are investing in “retargeting” or re-engaging users who have already accessed content about a destination or product via an app or mobile website.  Research shows that for every $1 invested in retargeting there is an incremental increase of $4 in sales.

It works best when focused on prospects who are already engaged.  A mistake many marketers make is viewing it as “missionary” work when at its very essence; it is more like gardening than hunting, more cultivating engagement than casting nets.

For retargeting to work, you need engagement and that begins with great content that zeroes in on what marketing intelligence (research) has identified as traits of greatest appeal to a specific audience.  Even more importantly, you must be willing to accept that your product isn’t for everyone and stop “yelling” to get attention such as with billboards.

The key objective to content marketing, which began its transcendence three decades ago, is to provide something of value focused around differentiation.

A form of retargeting can be seen in action when you leave a website to search another related to the same objective and an ad pops up with the opportunity to return to a deeper link on the earlier site.

The percentage of marketers overall that spend up to 50% on retargeting has doubled in the last year.  Nearly three-quarters (71%) of marketers spend between 10 to 50% of their digital marketing budgets on retargeting.

As marketing has been for more than three decades now, segmentation of those who access marketing content is at the core of retargeting.

Retargeting will be more of a challenge for community marketing organizations (DMOs) because they are intermediaries.  The actual transactions take place with stakeholder businesses and organizations but it can be done.

As one chief marketing officer, Adam Berke, noted recently, marketing placement has evolved from “guess and check” to real-time programmatic campaigns that leverage engagement to ROI.

So the next time you pass by a community still using traditional media such as outdoor billboards, wave hello to a real live “dinosaur.”

Also certain is that as much as I appear to keep up with destination marketing since retirement, I became a “dinosaur” the day I walked out the door.

The same can be said for today’s college graduates.  A degree is just the beginning of a lifetime of learning.